Hackatron asia is a technical hack event where you can check their web site on this link. The main challenges for this event are the integration of paypal and/or yotaphone in the application. During the start of the event I plan to use google cardboard with leap motion controller, but ended up in using google cardboard instead. Our team qualified for the top 16 out of the 40+ teams that pitched during the event, which is kinda not what we were expecting since we didn't put much effort into this event. Our team didn't stay overnight and most of the time we just talked and socialized. Our team was actually playing foo's ball in the sidelines when our team was announced as a qualifier. They also call our team wrongly preventing us on initially recognizing it (btw way our team name was 'VR', and the announcer called us as 'UR'). Overall the event was great and I were able to add a few connections related to gaming and start-ups.
Half of our first day we spent most of it looking for teams and identifying our idea. I also did a quick pitch as I look for additional team mates. Basically we just finalized our idea during dinner time, which in my criteria is kinda late. I was initially planning to use webgl to render a 3D view and we ended up using unity android application, which I find better compared to my initial idea. It was a quick dive, the unity application was readily finished, I was able to finish paypal quickly through braintree. Everything was a breeze except for the yotaphone integration. The guidelines were pretty straight forward and simple but my laptop, mac and even desktop either rejects the yotaphone emulator or it is just to slow to run android. Luckily the organizers have the real yota device for us to ticker with and were somehow able to join the yotaphone challenge. The main gist of our idea was a VR experience for events and product purchase. We have also integrated yota device to help us provide additional display feature.
Overall this hackathon is one of my favorite ones that I have attended to, because it a relaxed project, we were qualified as finalist and our idea is definitely unique vr experience. Things were smooth, but there are a few stuffs that are not so good about this event. First is that food is not so good, you also need to climb up 4th floor just to eat for lunch, the table is really big like in the wedding events, so there is a big free space in the middle. I prefer the square tables since most of the teams are comprised of 3-4 participants. There was also no beer! which is also good for teams who just attend this event because of the free beer. It was a great experience and hopefully my other future hackathons will be somewhat similar to this one.